The Drobo Elite

Datarobotics (DROBO) released the Drobo Pro in the summer of 2009 and it was a very welcome product by many, including yours truly.  However, they have now outdone themselves with a new line of products, one of which is the Drobo Elite.  The ‘Elite’ is geared towards a small to medium sized business and offers the same level of protection as the Drobo Pro does.  However, there are a few impressive upgrades that make this the best device to come out of the Datarobotics camp.

Pictures speak louder then words…so lets show you what the device looks like. (Click on the image for a larger version)

The Drobo Elite, like the Drobo Pro before it, supports dual drive failures (configured via the bundled software).  However, this particular unit houses a faster processor and thus provides approximately 50% faster throughput as compared to its predecessor.  The unit is equipped with dual iSCSI/Gigabit Ethernet ports and a USB based management port.  The ‘Elite’ utilizes what are known as Smart Volumes™ which utilize storage from a pool of drives rather then segregated physical drives and as models before it, it can take a mix of different SATA hard drives with different sizes.

The prices reflected below are MSRP:

DroboElite Base configuration $3499
DroboElite 16TB (8 x 2TB) Performance Bundle $5,899

Naturally if you do any purchasing you can see that the cost for 16TB (Terabytes) of total storage is phenomenally low as compared to products that provide a similar feature set.

Drobo / Datarobotics can be found at http://www.drobo.com